What kind of Macintosh do I need to participate in Second Life?

[Rufferta]

It's no fun trying to do something like the Fantasy Faire Quest when you every time you move you have to wait until the next bit of scenary rezzes.

I'm no techy. I did some adjustment to the SL viewer and the calibration on my monitor that helped a little, but I figure the problem is probably that my iMac is a few years old and thus obsolete and I need a new one.  I was hoping that someone here that is not always 'seeing grey' could tell me what system, graphics card, viewer, etc...they are using.

Not wanting to get into the "You ought to get a PC" argument - I'm too old to change religions.

Oh, and except for the mandatory Quest attachments I'm running as low-lag as possible - almost Ruthed.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Alwin Alcott]

 

What's the difference in pushing a icon on mac or pc?...totally nothing.

You only keep several hundreds of dollars/euro in your pocket when you dare to think out of you comfort box and try a pc.

Age has nothing to do with it.

[Blaze Nielsen]

Any high end iMac will run sl just fine. If you're on a budget you might consider the smaller 21.5" screen you can get without the retina monitor. I would go for the 16gb memory. The 27" version lets you get into a better AMD Radeon R9 M395X with 4GB video memory which will let you run at maximum settings in sl. However, no matter what puter you use, you'll always have some of the waiting period for stuff to rez. SL has a very very slow bandwidth thru their servers and unless its all cached in your hard drive, you have to download it fresh. good luck and enjoy your mac

 

[Rufferta]

 

Thank you!

 

[Gavin Hird]

A Mac that does not have integrated (Intel) graphics will perform better with SL than one with, but all of the current models will be able to run SL from the Air, minis, iMacs to the Pro models. 

[Rufferta]

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Gavin Hird wrote:

A Mac that does not have integrated (Intel) graphics will perform better with SL than one with, but all of the current models will be able to run SL from the Air, minis, iMacs to the Pro models. 

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Thank you - I'm not sure what that means, but I will print it out and show it to the tech when I have saved up enough to buy a new computer.

[Chris Frentis]

You could use any Mac from the last 8 years to use SL, with a later one looking substantially better because of the retina screens and video cards.  Largely your experience inworld is determined by by your viewer and the settings you chose. Setting your graphics options set to suit your machine and internet network speed will greatly enhance your ability to see a nicer faster picture. Reducing the amount of scripts your wearing like attachments or huds including them will impact lag greatly.  Using a PC or mac will be no difference as it is hardware dependent not operating system dependent.  I use Windows in Bootcamp  on my mac and it looks exactly the same as OSX. For a slower machine the alchemy viewer is considerably less laggy.

Read this:

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/General-Second-Life-Tech/iMac-5K-27-inch-display-in-SL-review/td-p/3027725

[Rufferta]

I may not need a new computer after all! After trying all the suggestions for improving the Second Life viewer, I tried using Firestorm and things seem to be working better. It's taking a while to get used to the slight difference in controls, but I thought I would mention it in case other Mac owners might be having viewing problems.

[Chris Frentis]

Thats great news! Also what you will notice a HUGE performance boost with is using the Alchemy viewer which is just as good but lighter. Firestorm slows down my older Mac noticibly.